The Boys are Back in Town: Grown Ups Reviewed

Adam Sandler's back! Chris Rock's back! Some other people are back! Not screened by WW press deadlines! Whatever! It sucks!

Grown Ups

WWCritic's Score: 15

“Let's try to act normal in there,” Hollywood agent Adam Sandler tells his Voss-quaffing brats as they arrive at a funeral. Good luck with that: Before the end of the eulogy, Sandler and his coarse pals (Chris Rock, Kevin James, David Spade and Rob Schneider) are loudly trading insults in the pews, while the rest of the mourners laugh appreciatively. This Grown Ups scene is representative of what's become of the Happy Madison mentality—bullying is the only memory these wealthy comedians have of ordinary male behavior, and they assume the rest of the room is a perpetually grateful audience. The puerility and entitlement are exactly on par with the attitudes on display in Sex and the City 2—this picture won't receive the same fevered vitriol, but it deserves it. The cast of both movies should go on a blind date together: They could take turns joking about their genitals, and then maybe somebody could lock the doors and set the room on fire.

Alone among this crew of crudes, I find Kevin James likeable, though I would like him more if he stopped publicly humiliating himself like some tubby submissive—it's as if Chunk from The Goonies was still doing the Truffle Shuffle to keep his friends. No, seriously: He actually wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head and dances. The condescension to small-town citizens (Sandler and son let the yokels win at basketball, because, hey, those rubes already lost at life) is paired with behavior that would cause any village idiot to back away nervously: The guys shoot real arrows straight into the air and run away, although at least one of them usually falls face first into bear shit. (Somehow, they are legally allowed to raise children with their gorgeous, ignored wives Penelope Cruz, Maria Bello and Maya Rudolph.) They're just regular folks: They go water slides. Then they go on water slides again. You can watch them go on water slides, at length, and honestly if you paid good money to see a movie that is advertised as grown-ass men on a water slide, you pretty much deserve what you get, don't you?